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Definitely. They are basically an unnecessarily complicated way of storing 24-bit data in a 32-bit container. Floating point makes sense for data with a widely varying range, but not for well-constrained audio data.

Tbh there are other reasons people want to do this; programming with a 32 bit word length on all your data is in some ways better and certainly intrinsically more efficient inside the CPU itself, though of course it doesn't add anything of any benefit to the content. We've been running pointlessly 32 bit graphics displays for a decade or two when there's only 24 bits of colour information.

Tbh there are other reasons people want to do this; programming with a 32 bit word length on all your data is in some ways better and certainly intrinsically more efficient inside the CPU itself, though of course it doesn't add anything of any benefit to the content.

That definitely applies for 32-bit integers, but with floating point it depends on the FP capabilities of the processor - and going floating point requires care in handling rounding errors.

"To try to judge the real from the false will always be hard. In this fast-growing art of 'high fidelity' the quackery will bear a solid gilt edge that will fool many people" - Paul W Klipsch, 1953

Yes and no, the inherent alignment on word/cache line boundaries can improve performance regardless of whether the data represents an FP or INT value. Subsequent processing in FP brings its own problems though, I agree.

So you would argue that the downsampling (using a high quality algorithm) is audible?

I wrote it isn't always a good idea to down-sample.

I was actually assuming high quality down-sampling. My concern is really the quality of up-sampling in older DACs - a concern which is lessened with higher rate input. Newer DACs should have higher quality up-sampling, so down-sampling your files would be less of an issue with these.

Since there is little up-side to it, my rule of thumb is not to down-sample.